WASHINGTON – As an exercise in gross presidential power, it was a failure. As a political tactic, the shot backfired. And as an end to his final weeks in office, President Trump’s threat to veto a $ 900 billion Covid relief and a government financing account merely underscored his tumultuous ownership in the Oval Office.
For five days, starting before Christmas, Mr. Trump has virtually held the country hostage, delaying the extension of unemployment insurance to millions of unemployed Americans, preventing the delivery of $ 600 checks and hanging the possibility of a total shutdown of the government even when officials rushed to distribute a coronavirus vaccine.
And then he relented.
After calling the bill “a disgrace” and mocking checks as “petty”, the president signed into law on Sunday night, claiming he won congressional grants in the process, including votes to increase individual payments to $ 2,000. But in fact, Trump has achieved little more than a few promises to save the face that will do nothing to substantially change bipartisan legislation.
“It is another example of the history of the Trump presidency,” said Michael Steel, who was press secretary to John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, when Boehner was the mayor. “He got a few more days of chaos at the end of a chaotic presidency.”
The veto threat was the latest ploy to get the attention of a president who appears unwilling to accept the reality that Washington is moving forward without him. With only 23 days left of his term, Trump tried – and failed – to at least regain the appearance that he is still in control of the nation’s destiny.
On Monday, Democrats tested the president’s demands in a House vote to raise individual stimulus payments to $ 2,000, an effort to get approval for heavier payments long supported by Democrats or force Republicans to reject them and challenge Trump. The vote has just reached the two-thirds majority needed to pass the House, with 44 Republican lawmakers supporting the effort.
It is not clear whether the Senate will accept such a move. Senate Republicans have resisted increasing payments, citing concerns about the federal budget deficit, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican and majority leader, in a statement on Sunday made no mention of payments of $ 2,000 or whatever. of the president’s statements about the next steps for the camera he controls.
Trump’s threat to overturn a Covid relief bill that took months for lawmakers to agree on came in a typically dramatic way: on December 22, the president posted a four-minute video for Twitter in which he breathlessly ridiculed foreign aid spending and other examples of what he called a “pig” in a bill that his own Treasury secretary and Republican lawmakers negotiated with Democrats in Congress.
“It really is a shame,” he said, citing spending he had endorsed in his own budget and falsely claiming that the legislation “has almost nothing to do with Covid.”
He continued days of tweets, demanding that lawmakers “Increase payments to the people” and stop the billions of dollars in “pork”. It was a repeat of the suspense he forced the country to endure in spring 2018, when Republican lawmakers managed to discredit the president of his threat to veto a $ 1.3 trillion spending deal.
That handshake happened again over the holiday weekend, when two of his closest Capitol allies, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, tried to persuade the president to back down and sign the legislation.
Graham personally lobbied Trump during a round of golf on Christmas Day at the president’s club in West Palm Beach, Florida. And McCarthy talked for hours on the phone with Trump, spending much of Sunday trying to ease the president’s concerns even as he recovered from elbow surgery, according to officials familiar with the talks.
But while Trump’s decision to sign the bill averted the calamity of a government shutdown amid a pandemic that is killing more than 1,000 Americans a day, even Republicans struggled to understand how his threat of veto accomplished many positive things for the president or his party.
On a practical level, he received very little.
In a statement released after he signed the legislation, Trump said he was “demanding many terminations,” a technical term for a president’s requests to Congress to allow the government to cut spending that he determines is no longer needed.
But, as Trump found out when trying a similar tactic in 2018, it only works if a president succeeds in obtaining bipartisan support. (That year, several Republicans in the Senate voted against a $ 15 billion termination request from Mr. Trump.)
On Sunday, Representative Nita M. Lowey, a Democrat from New York and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, made it clear that the president’s effort would not be successful.
“The House Appropriations Committee has jurisdiction over terminations, and our democratic majority will reject any termination presented by President Trump,” she said in a statement.
Trump said the House and Senate “agreed to focus heavily on the very substantial electoral fraud that took place” in the 2020 elections. In fact, the House, run by Democrats, will certainly ignore this charge. And even in the Senate there is little appetite for joining the president’s electoral fraud crusade.
The Republican leadership this month asked senators on a private call to accept the election results and not join an effort led by some House Republicans to overthrow them.
And Congress is unlikely to accept Trump’s call to eliminate protections for social media companies. He argued without evidence that Section 230 allows sites to censor conservative opinions, but the data shows that conservative personalities and editors often thrive online.
While concerns about Section 230 are bipartisan, lawmakers are unlikely to reach agreement on the matter next week. Trump and his allies have yet to find substantial common ground with Democrats, who primarily want changes in combating discriminatory advertising or terrorist content online.
Politically, the president’s veto threats served only to put his Republican allies in the House and Senate at risk.
In the House, Republicans who were eager to reject $ 2,000 stimulus checks could not simply ridicule it as an idea devised by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, who quickly took advantage of the president’s words to try to approve a bill. law that would increase direct payments. Those who wanted to vote against the larger sum had to resist their own president – and the voters who support him – too.
Congressman Kevin Brady, from Texas, the main Republican on the Forms and Means Committee, complained in the House plenary that the proposal had been “hurled at us at the last minute” and would not help those who needed it most.
“I am concerned that these colossal $ 463 billion will not do what is necessary, stimulate the economy or help workers get back to work,” said Brady.
In the Senate, the president’s five-day complaint served only to confuse the Republican position on direct payments, which had been carefully calibrated with senior members of the Trump administration.
For months during the negotiations, Senate Republicans resisted increasing payments over $ 600, citing concerns about the federal budget deficit. It is unclear whether the Senate will vote on increasing the size of checks.
Mr. Trump said that “the Senate will start the voting process” on checks for $ 2,000. In the legislative jargon that governs the Senate, this is far from guaranteeing the approval of the larger budget.
Brendan Buck, a Republican strategist who served as senior adviser to Paul Ryan, Wisconsin, when he was mayor, said he was deeply skeptical that Republicans would like to defend the president’s cause for greater stimulus payments. And Mr. Buck noticed that there was almost no time for that to happen, anyway.
“It is not based on any reality: substance and politics and the clock. There is no chance for that, ”he said. “It seems that he gave in totally without receiving anything, and it is not clear to me why.”
In four years at the White House, Trump has had some success in submitting Congress to his will. He worked with Republican lawmakers to get a $ 1.5 trillion tax cut in 2017. His Republican allies in the Senate confirmed a record number of federal judges, including three new Supreme Court judges.
But the threat to veto Covid’s relief bill was a fruitless exercise that will do little to reinforce Trump’s legacy.
David McCabe contributed reports.